The “Café Cultural Sur Andino” is not only a café. Behind its facade of colonial archs, as many buildings in Cusco, the Incaic foundations speak about history. And here we are, men and women who, with compromise and solidarity, obstinately try to get involved with the cultures of the forests and mountains.

When we say “here we are”, we refer to all the people who give a sense to the initiatives to reinforce the utopias dreamt, fought, hoped and reached since long. We are referring to all the people who come to share the dialogue, the brotherhood and a creative way of maintaining the dignity of many villages in the world, and specially, in this “Sur Andino” place.  We enjoy the taste of a good coffee and let the flavour overwhelm us with a better option in life.

It is difficult to define who we are. It is easier to define our services and convictions. Who are we? We are the students that we have in Ollachea, Juliaca, Puno, those 40 young people at different stages in their studies, who migrated to the villages to study. This people are starting to understand that they have to make the most of the chances for their personal and communal development. Young people who want and have the right to defend life by entering the professional world and confront the common interests.    

With this café we also want to generate economic resources to help these young people help themselves. Then, these people can attain their own dignity. This is important, for we do not want to be economically dependent on anybody. On the contrary, we want that these individuals, from their own identity, create their own way, with an open mind and ear, knowing that there are friends who can help them solve their difficulties.    

We are the Manu, the forest which embraces us with its vegetation so much threatened by multinationals which want to destroy the wise vegetation, and thus, threaten to break, as it were an involuntary mistake, the lives of the indigenous people.

From our café, since some years ago, we are offering you the possibility to become a volunteer who, with complete freedom and commitment, can go deep into the world of Manu, to reforest, write, calm down the egotist impatience and change it into an impatience to save the planet. We want, from this café, to be witnesses of this task, and thus, get together and give support to environmental organizations and to make ours the motto “save the planet” during the next Latin-American Agenda. The buildings we have in Manu, are completely ecological and controlled, with a keen respect to the ecosystem. They are not luxury hotels, not the kind of tourism that justifies itself by saying that they give jobs to the indigenous people, while destroying the environment. The tourism which doesn´t respect life becomes an accomplice to the planet degradation and to the powerful people. Nature and life must not be humiliated but savoured, cared and loved.  

Our repeated question... Who are we?: we are you, you who want to share our multicultural and ancestral world; you who want to give a names to the faces, who yearn for a green world full of happiness, with animals roaming freely. We are you who, although not able to visit our country of milk and honey, are weaving threads of worldwide fraternity. We are you who are not included to the mainstream culture, the poorest, the exiled, the immigrants, the artists, the not wanted fighters, the ones who question things, the “nobodies”, the ones who walk, the true inheritors of the earth of peace. 

We are waiting for you... let´s have a nice and flavoured Machupicchu coffee.

Thanks and a hug full of hope.